A border says a collection has been divided. A registration says a product is protected. A national average says a country is catching up. A statute says farmers' data will be safe. This month, we looked beneath each of them.

Beneath the border, Chandayan, a fourteenth-century Sufi romance, was divided between Indian and Pakistani custodians, but the history that made it possible was not divided with it. Beneath the GI tag on Mithila Makhana sit a long chain of intermediaries, thin processing infrastructure and women whose post-harvest work the registration does not record. Beneath India's education figures, the rural gender gap is more than four times as wide as the urban one. Beneath the DPDP Act's implementation timetable, farmers are losing savings to fake scheme apps now. And beneath a regional total of 17.6 million people of concern to UNHCR, Asia and the Pacific holds 59 per cent of the world's stateless people. That changes the question from who has crossed a border to who holds recognised legal membership at all.

Counting is the easy part of intellectual property. Patents filed, trademarks registered, grants issued: the numbers are public, and they tend to be read as the whole story. This month, ASIA's first flagship report asks what those numbers actually connect to.

The State of Intellectual Property in India, by Shivani Singh (CLET) and Sonal Lalwani (CCER), is published by Manohar Publishers. It covers 2021 to 2025 across 15 chapters, drawing on national data, case law and international benchmarks from WIPO, the Global Innovation Index and the PCT, Madrid and Hague systems. It looks past the growth in IP activity to ask how India's IP system connects with research, technology, industry and culture.

Issue 3 also follows research past the desk. A status report on Ayush-related patents reached the shelf of the patent office. A representation on newborn fire safety reached the NHRC. And a much older question runs through the issue: when does a decision made by a colonial revenue office still shape who gets a school, a road or a harvest, and when does it fade?

THIS MONTH'S INVITATION
If one of these questions overlaps with your research, data, institution or funding priorities, we would like to hear from you, particularly where there is scope for a data partnership, research collaboration, expert contribution or support for a defined project.

Team SUNA

What does five years of India's IP data actually tell us?

The State of Intellectual Property in India, by Shivani Singh (CLET) and Sonal Lalwani (CCER) and published by Manohar Publishers & Distributors, is ASIA's flagship report in book form.

It goes beyond counting patents and trademarks. It asks how India's IP system connects with research, technology, industry and culture. It covers 2021 to 2025 across 15 chapters, drawing on national data, case law, and international benchmarks from WIPO, the Global Innovation Index and the PCT, Madrid and Hague systems.

The State of Intellectual Property in India is a comprehensive assessment of India’s intellectual property ecosystem and its evolution over 2021–2025. Organised into four broad sections and 15 chapters, it examines the evolution of India’s IP system and institutional architecture, patents and patent administration, trademarks and copyright, industrial designs, geographical indications, traditional knowledge and plant varieties, digital IP and technology sovereignty, artificial intelligence, semiconductors and other emerging technologies, and India’s broader innovation performance.

The report brings together national IP data with international evidence from WIPO, the Global Innovation Index, World Intellectual Property Indicators, PCT, Madrid and Hague systems, alongside relevant policy and institutional developments. It looks beyond the growth of IP activity to examine how India's IP ecosystem connects with research, innovation, technology, industry, culture and economic development.

[Available Now on Amazon.in]

In the fourteenth century, the Sufi poet Maulana Daud composed Chandayan, the story of Chanda and Laur, in an early form of Hindavi. Centuries later, an illustrated manuscript of the romance entered the Lahore Museum. Its history might have remained one of literary and artistic circulation had the political geography around it not changed in 1947. When British India's assets were divided between India and Pakistan, museum collections were included in the settlement. The Lahore Museum's holdings were consequently apportioned between the two countries. Chandayan was among the works divided. Folios associated with the manuscript are today dispersed across institutions in Lahore, Karachi and Chandigarh.

Other objects underwent even more literal forms of division. Jewellery excavated at Harappa, Mohenjo-daro and Taxila could be dismantled, with beads and pendants separated and restrung so that both states received portions of archaeological collections. Chandigarh's Government Museum and Art Gallery, established after Partition, received 627 Gandharan sculptures from the Lahore Museum as part of this redistribution.

These were administrative solutions to an immediate problem: two successor states needed to divide the institutions and property of a departed colonial government. But museum objects presented a difficulty that furniture, offices or financial assets did not. Their value derived partly from historical relationships that the new border had not created and could not neatly divide.

The problem remains relevant: what does it mean for a modern state to own a past older than itself?

Partition did not create the problem of ownership from nothing. Colonial archaeology had already removed objects from archaeological sites, classified them by particular historical periods, and distributed them among museums. An object excavated at Mohenjo-daro could therefore be physically located far from Mohenjo-daro well before 1947. Independence changed the political meaning of those arrangements. Collections assembled under an imperial administration became the inheritance of sovereign states. The question was no longer simply where an object should be stored, but how the histories those objects represented related to new national territories.

The Indus civilisation made the difficulty especially clear. Its principal excavated urban sites, Harappa and Mohenjo-daro, became part of Pakistan. Yet the civilisation had developed millennia before Pakistan, India or their present borders existed, and objects from those sites had already entered collections elsewhere. Gandharan material presented a similar problem. The archaeological geography of Gandhara lies principally across present-day Pakistan and Afghanistan. The Taxila Museum holds material excavated from Buddhist monasteries, stupas and settlements in the Taxila Valley. Yet hundreds of Gandharan sculptures from the former Lahore collection became part of the museum established in Chandigarh after Partition.

An object could legally belong to an Indian museum, have been excavated in what became Pakistan, originate in a cultural geography extending into Afghanistan, and represent a religious history connecting sites much further across Asia. None of those descriptions is necessarily incorrect. The problem begins when one expects to exhaust the object's meaning.

A national museum places objects into sequences: ancient, medieval, modern; Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, Sikh; archaeological, artistic, ethnographic. Those categories determine which histories appear continuous and which appear separate. They also allow states created in the twentieth century to narrate relationships with histories extending thousands of years into the past.

Pakistan therefore inherited a question more complicated than whether pre-Islamic archaeological material belonged within its borders. Harappa, Mohenjo-daro, Taxila, and Gandharan Buddhist sites became part of Pakistan's territory and, consequently, part of the heritage administered by the Pakistani state. Their incorporation into museums and archaeological institutions also required an account of how these histories related to the national past. India faced a different version of the same problem. Collections inherited through Partition included material whose archaeological provenance now lay across an international border. The Government Museum and Art Gallery in Chandigarh itself emerged from this history: its founding collection included part of the Indian share of the Lahore Museum.

The division of museum collections was therefore not simply the final administrative act of British India. It helped establish the material from which two postcolonial states would construct national historical narratives.

The Chandayan is useful precisely because it unsettles an exclusive relationship between territory and historical ownership.

Its fourteenth-century author could not have imagined India and Pakistan as the political categories through which his work would eventually be classified. Its Hindavi language belongs to a linguistic history that similarly exceeds contemporary borders. The manuscript's present distribution tells us something about twentieth-century state formation, but very little about the cultural geography in which the work was created.

There is legal ownership: which institution possesses an object. There is provenance: where an object was produced, excavated or collected. There is historical association: the communities, languages, religions and political formations through which it acquired meaning. And there is public memory: the people who subsequently understand that past as part of their inheritance. Though claims can overlap, they do not have to.

Recognising that distinction also prevents “shared heritage” from becoming an easy solution. Calling Chandayan, Gandharan sculpture or the Indus civilisation a common South Asian inheritance does not answer who should conserve an object, where it should be displayed, whether divided collections should be digitally or physically reunited, or how museums should describe histories that cross contemporary borders. Nearly eighty years after Partition, the division of the Lahore Museum remains useful because it exposes a problem usually hidden by the apparent permanence of national collections. Museums make objects look settled. Their institutional histories often are not.

The question worth carrying forward is therefore more precise than asking whether India and Pakistan share a past. They plainly do, alongside histories that developed differently before and after 1947. The harder question is how states should act as custodians of histories whose cultural geographies exceed their sovereign territory.

The division of Chandayan produced Indian and Pakistani custodians of its pages. It did not produce an Indian half and a Pakistani half of the history that made the manuscript possible.

ASIA's scoping work frames farmer data protection in India's agri-tech sector as an unfolding institutional question rather than a settled compliance picture. Two things are moving on parallel tracks: the law itself, and the harm it's meant to prevent.

What has changed: The Digital Personal Data Protection Act, 2023 (DPDP Act) now has an implementation clock. The Data Protection Board of India (the Board) was constituted and procedural provisions took effect in November 2025, Consent Manager registration opens in November 2026, and the substantive protections farmers actually need, notice, consent, security safeguards, breach notification, children's-data rules, arrive only around May 2027. Meanwhile, the agricultural mobile applications ASIA reviewed are visibly, if unevenly, adapting their privacy policies to reference the new framework, though a bundled consent structure common across the sector remains largely unchanged.

At the same time, documented farmer-targeted fraud keeps accumulating. Cybercriminals have used fake government scheme apps and phishing links to drain individual farmers' savings, including a Karnataka farmer's Rs. 1.74 lakh loss to a fraudulent link, and breached government portals such as Haryana's Meri Fasal Mera Byora (MFMB) portal to divert welfare payments across nearly 1.89 lakh acres. A supplementary review found this pattern is not new: a researcher flagged unauthenticated Aadhaar exposure on the Pradhan Mantri Kisan Samman Nidhi (PM-Kisan) website, affecting over 110 million registered farmers, back in 2022, and state land-record systems have shown the same structural vulnerability persisting across independent studies conducted five years apart.

What remains unresolved: Whether the DPDP Act framework, once fully in force, will actually close the gap that scammers exploit, since ordinary consent checks whether a farmer agreed to something, not whether the counterparty asking was genuine. Also unresolved: whether any high-volume agricultural application will be designated a Significant Data Fiduciary (SDF), how cross-border data held by foreign-headquartered platforms will be treated once a restricted-country list exists, and whether farmer organisations get a dedicated consultation channel on data protection specifically, rather than only the standard cross-sectoral rulemaking process open to the public generally.

17.6 million people in Asia and the Pacific of concern to UNHCR at the end of 2025

That figure represents 14 per cent of the 129.4 million people UNHCR protects or assists worldwide, and it grew by 2 per cent over the previous year. Most of the regional total is accounted for by two situations. Afghanistan remains one of the largest countries of origin for refugees, and conflict in Myanmar continues to generate new displacement. The region also hosts 12 per cent of the world's refugees and asylum-seekers.

The statistic that changes the question is the region's share of statelessness. Asia and the Pacific holds 59 per cent of all recorded stateless people worldwide. These are individuals whom no state recognises as a national. When more than half of the world's stateless population lives in one region, the analytical question moves from how many people have crossed borders to who holds any recognised legal membership at all.

The total, however, combines refugees, asylum-seekers, internally displaced people, stateless people and returnees into a single category. It is therefore not a count of refugees alone, nor a measure of people in active crisis at a given moment. UNHCR reports that funding shortfalls are restricting access to shelter, education, healthcare and protection, so the figure captures both the scale of need and the constraints on meeting it.

Source: UNHCR, Asia and the Pacific Regional Trends Report 2025 (released 20 August 2026).

Economists, historians and political scientists have long debated how far institutions outlive the circumstances that created them. India offers an unusually clear test. British rule reached different parts of the subcontinent through different arrangements: some districts gave land-revenue rights to landlords, others to cultivators, and princely states kept their own rulers.

In 2005, Abhijit Banerjee and Lakshmi Iyer found that landlord-based areas had lower agricultural investment and productivity after independence, and lower investment in health and education. They explained this through institutions: historical arrangements shaped later policy choices. Iyer's 2010 study of direct versus indirect rule found that directly ruled areas had lower access to schools, health centres and roads, suggesting that the form colonial rule took could have long-term consequences for public goods. Later studies of indirect rule, however, have produced mixed results.

The land-tenure finding has also been contested. In 2013, Iversen, Palmer-Jones and Sen used archival evidence to argue that the Central Provinces had been misclassified as largely landlord-based when the system was in fact mixed, and that the corrected classification removed evidence of a landlord penalty in agricultural performance. Banerjee and Iyer replied in the same issue of the journal. A 2024 village-level study, using a different method, found that villages assigned to landlords were poorer in 2012, with lower per-capita consumption.

Then came an update. In 2025, Iyer and Coleson Weir extended the original data by two decades. They found that the disadvantages of direct rule in access to schools, health centres and roads had disappeared by 2011, and they point to targeted programmes such as Sarva Shiksha Abhiyan, the National Rural Health Mission and PMGSY. Land tenure told a different story: non-landlord areas still had higher crop yields, higher educational attainment and lower poverty six decades after colonial rule ended.

So the question is no longer whether colonial institutions leave a legacy. It is: when does that legacy persist, when does it fade, and what makes the difference?

Read together, the studies point to a pattern worth testing rather than a settled rule. Gaps closed where the state aimed directly at them, through programmes built to equalise access to schools, clinics and roads. They persisted where advantage compounds through private investment and the adoption of new technology. Iyer and Weir note that fertiliser subsidies went to all farmers rather than underserved areas, which may have helped those already ahead. Access also converged faster than outcomes: poverty and education gaps narrowed but did not vanish. The 2013 dispute shows how much can rest on how a single district is classified, yet Iyer and Weir report that most later studies point the same way as the original land-tenure finding. If the pattern holds, history sets the starting line and policy design decides how long it matters.

A Geographical Indication establishes a legal connection between a product and a particular place. But the registration is only one part of the story. To understand what that geographical identity represents in practice, it is necessary to look at the ecology, knowledge, labour, production systems, markets and institutions surrounding the product.

The research began with the recognition of Makhana as a product deeply rooted in the wetlands and cultural life of Mithila, and its subsequent transformation into a GI-protected product with growing domestic and international economic significance. The report therefore examines Mithila Makhana across two connected dimensions: its historical, cultural and ecological foundations, and its contemporary market, trade and policy environment.

What does the story of Mithila Makhana reveal about the relationship between geographical identity, traditional knowledge, livelihoods, markets and intellectual property?

Mithila Makhana is cultivated in the wetland ecosystems of the Mithila region and its production is closely associated with local ecology and traditional knowledge. Its distinctive characteristics are linked in the report to the region's freshwater bodies and alluvial soils. In April 2022, Mithila Makhana received Geographical Indication recognition, formally linking the product to its geographical identity. The GI documentation also records the role of Bihar Agricultural University, Sabour, in providing scientific documentation and technical validation. The sector has also expanded significantly. The report records approximately 36,000 hectares under Makhana cultivation across around ten districts of Bihar, with nearly five lakh farm households involved. Its value chain extends across five principal stages: farming and harvesting, popping, trading, processing and grading, and branding and retail.

The GI registration establishes geographical protection, but it does not by itself capture the wider system through which the product is produced and reaches consumers.

The research therefore looks underneath the registration.

Who performs the work? Where does value accrue along the chain? What happens between cultivation and retail? How are traditional production practices changing as demand grows? What constraints affect producers and processors? And what happens to the ecological systems on which Makhana cultivation depends?
The evidence brings these questions into view. The report identifies a long intermediary chain, limited processing and storage infrastructure, grading and standardisation gaps, weak GI-based branding and enforcement, and limited farmer access to formal credit. It also highlights the significant contribution of women to post-harvest activities and the ecological pressures facing Bihar's wetlands.

ASIA's Mithila Makhana: Culture, Policy and Market Analysis brings these different bodies of evidence into a single analysis.

The research draws on official intellectual-property records, including the GI registration certificate and the Government of India's GI Application Register; government policy and administrative documents, including Union Budget and Bihar government material; agricultural and institutional research, including ICAR and Bihar agricultural sources; market and trade evidence, including APEDA data; and academic and field-based research on cultivation, traditional knowledge, value chains and women's participation. This evidence was complemented by the 2025 GI Manthan roundtable, “Strengthening the Makhana Sector,” co-hosted by ASIA, the Office of the Controller General of Patents, Designs and Trade Marks, Government of India, and other institutional partners. The discussion brought sector participants into the analysis of cultivation, processing, value distribution, infrastructure, exports and ecological constraints.

The result is a picture of Makhana that cannot be captured by the GI registration alone. It is simultaneously a GI-protected product, an agricultural crop, a traditional knowledge system, a source of rural livelihoods, a growing consumer product and an emerging export commodity.

We could move from asking simply whether Mithila Makhana is protected to asking whether the institutions and value chains around that protection are working effectively.

That distinction makes the evidence useful.

The analysis identifies specific points at which the GI, agricultural, market and policy systems intersect: GI certification and traceability, farmer organisation, credit, processing infrastructure, grading standards, export infrastructure, branding and ecological sustainability. It also makes visible groups whose work is central to the production system, particularly the Mallah communities involved in cultivation and harvesting and women involved extensively in post-harvest processing.
The value of the research, therefore, is not simply that it documents another GI product. It connects evidence that normally sits in separate places and uses that evidence to show how legal recognition, traditional knowledge, production, markets and policy interact around a living product.

Sources:

Method note:

The report synthesises these documentary, statistical, academic and consultation-based sources to examine Mithila Makhana across its historical and cultural foundations, ecological setting, production and value chain, markets and trade, and intellectual-property and policy framework. The 2025 GI Manthan discussion provides additional stakeholder evidence on current sectoral constraints and opportunities. The report does not present a new ASIA-led farmer survey or experimental study.

Research output:

Mithila Makhana: Culture, Policy and Market Analysis, Advanced Study Institute of Asia, together with the ASIA research output Strengthening the Makhana Sector: A GI Case Study (2025).

Research/ Output: Status Report on Ayush related Inventions in India

What Happened: The report establishes an evidence-based picture of Ayush-related patent activity in India from FY 2014–15 to FY 2025–26. It documents 4,077 patent applications and 711 grants, analyses filing and grant trends, applicant profiles and geographical distribution, and examines relevant policy developments, including the role of the Traditional Knowledge Digital Library (TKDL). The report was published by the Office of The Controller General of Patents, Designs & Trademarks, Department for Promotion of Industry and Internal Trade, Ministry of Commerce and Industry, Government of India at the 11^th Ayurveda Day on 23^rd September, 2026.

Evidence Link: https://ipindia.gov.in/dynamic/news-details/141

Research/Output: Neonatal Fire Safety in India: Recurring Risks, Systemic Gaps and Institutional Accountability

What Happened: The Centre for Health Equity (CHE), Advanced Study Institute of Asia (ASIA), has submitted a representation to the National Human Rights Commission (NHRC) seeking a wider examination of recurring fire-safety failures in Neonatal Intensive Care Units (NICUs) and Special Newborn Care Units (SNCUs) in government hospitals. The representation follows the fire at the District Women’s Hospital in Amravati, Maharashtra, on 24 August 2026, which killed three newborns and led to the evacuation of 36 others, and the fire at the District Hospital in Chhindwara, Madhya Pradesh, on 22 August 2026, which caused burn injuries to three newborns and the death of one infant during transfer for specialised care. The NHRC has taken suo motu cognisance of the Amravati incident and issued notice to the Chief Secretary of Maharashtra; the representation draws attention to the absence, to the Centre’s knowledge, of a corresponding human-rights or judicial proceeding in relation to Chhindwara.

The representation places these incidents within a longer pattern of similar fire-related incidents in neonatal and public healthcare facilities, where inquiries and institutional reviews have repeatedly identified concerns such as absent or expired Fire NOCs, non-functional fire-detection and suppression systems, inadequate staff preparedness, and weak coordination among health, fire, electrical and public-works authorities. Along with the representation, CHE shared a briefing note, Briefing Note on Fire Safety in NICUs and SNCUs, examining these incidents, existing fire-safety requirements and institutional responses. The representation raises a broader question of whether repeated failures in government healthcare facilities, despite previous inquiries, directions and regulatory frameworks, point to gaps in the effective implementation and verification of fire-safety measures and the State’s obligation to protect the fundamental right to life under Article 21 of the Constitution.

The National Human Rights Commission (NHRC), has taken cognisance under Section 12 of the Protection of Human Rights Act, 1993, of the recent neonatal fire incidents in Amravati, Maharashtra, and Chhindwara, Madhya Pradesh. The Commission has directed the Ministry of Health and Family Welfare and the Chief Secretaries of all States/UTs to ensure safety and fire audits of all NICUs, SNCUs and PICUs across government and private facilities. The Chief Secretaries of Maharashtra and Madhya Pradesh have also been directed to submit reports on the respective incidents.

Evidence Link: https://asiaresearch.co/neonatal-fire-safety-in-india-recurring-risks-systemic-gaps-and-institutional-accountability-briefing-note-on-fire-safety-in-nicus-and-sncus/

The rural gender education gap of 10.2 percentage points means millions of rural women are left behind.

According to the National Family Health Survey (NFHS)-6 (2023–24), 54.6% of Indian men and 46.4% of Indian women have completed 10 or more years of education. This represents progress from NFHS-5, with the gender gap narrowing from 9.2 percentage points to 8.2 percentage points.

However, NFHS-6 data reveal stark urban-rural disparities that are masked by the national figures. In urban areas, 64% of men and 61.5% of women have completed 10 or more years of education. In rural areas, the corresponding figures are 49.9% for men and 39.7% for women. The gender gap in rural areas (10.2 percentage points) is more than four times as wide as in urban areas (2.5 percentage points).

What happens when a generation of economists trained at Cambridge returns to a newly decolonising South Asia?

In this episode of SenseMaker, we speak with Professor David C. Engerman, Leitner International Interdisciplinary Professor in the Department of History and the Jackson School of Global Affairs at Yale University. Professor Engerman specialises in twentieth-century international history, U.S. foreign relations, and the global history of development. His research explores the history of modernisation, U.S.–Soviet relations, foreign aid, and global inequality, with particular attention to South Asia and the Cold War.

He is the author of Apostles of Development: Six Economists and the World They Made, which examines the intellectual journeys of six influential South Asian economists and the worlds they helped shape.

The conversation moves from the corridors of Cambridge in the 1950s to economic planning, inequality, liberalisation, the World Bank, human development and the changing role of economists in public policy.

ASIA SenseMaker is our flagship conversation series that brings together leading scholars, policymakers, and public intellectuals for discussions that combine the accessibility of an informal conversation with the depth and rigor of an academic seminar. Through these dialogues, we seek to foster critical thinking and encourage informed engagement with some of the most important questions shaping our world today.

Watch the full conversation on YouTube:

Research travels further when it meets other people's questions. If something in this issue overlaps with your data, your institution or your own line of inquiry, we would like to hear from you.

Write to us at [email protected] and tell us where our questions meet.

ASIA operates under a governing framework called the "3I Framework" — Inquire (beginning every project with a genuine question rather than a predetermined conclusion), Interpret (connecting regional events to global patterns and situating policy in context), and Illuminate (conveying genuine complexity to audiences who need to act on it, rather than simply publishing research that sits unread).

Despite being only three years old, ASIA has already placed research in major outlets like The Hindu, Financial Express, Economic Times, and Der Spiegel; convened conferences including national and international and secured formal recognition as a partner in the WHO/UNEP-led Global Alliance to Eliminate Lead Paint. The Institute is governed by a board chaired by Najeeb H Jung, with Dr Indu Bhushan as Vice Chairperson, and members including Dr Rajat M. Nag, Sandhya Vasudevan, and Prof. Amogh Dev Rai serves as Research Director and Ex-Officio Board Member.

What It Does

ASIA's work is organized across six research centres, each committed to a defined five-year research question rather than broad thematic coverage:

Beyond research, ASIA produces publications (journals, policy briefs, monographs, working papers), hosts podcasts and webinars (including the SenseMaker series), and convenes conferences and dialogues.